Four passengers, including a five-year-old girl, returning from London tested positive for Covid-19 on Sunday after arriving at Kolkata’s Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose International Airport. Health department officials said they have been admitted to private hospitals.
Sources said that it is not clear if the passengers are infected by the Omicron variant of coronavirus, which is why their samples will be sent for genome sequencing on Monday. They added that all of them are either mildly symptomatic or asymptomatic, and have been isolated in single occupancy cabins.
The passengers were residents of Kaikhali, Prince Anwar Shah Road, Shyambazar and Hatibagan localities of Kolkata.
West Bengal recorded five more casualties due to Covid-19 and 544 new cases. The deaths and the new cases took the state’s collective case count and toll to 16,30,626 and 19,716 respectively. Of the five deaths reported in the past 24 hours, three were from Kolkata. The city also clocked the highest number of new cases — 219 — as compared to other districts of the state.
Currently, there are 7,450 active cases in West Bengal — 6,666 in home isolation and 154 in safe homes. Over the past 24 hours, 547 patients have been discharged taking the discharge rate to 98.33 per cent. Till now, 2,12,24,366 samples have been tested in West Bengal and the state’s positivity rate stands at 2.41 per cent.
Meanwhile, Congress Parliamentary Party leader in Lok Sabha Adhir Choudhury on Sunday urged Prime Minister Narendra Modi to take up with the West Bengal government the issue of setting up two makeshift Covid hospitals in Murshidabad and Nadia districts. The Prime Minister’s Office had earlier given the go-ahead for the hospitals.
The Berharampur MP also called upon Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee to coordinate with the Centre to hasten construction of the two health facilities in a coordinated manner.
“Yesterday, you addressed the nation regarding the imminent danger of omicron and the third wave of COVID-19? I would request you to kindly instruct the state government of West Bengal to do the needful on their part in respect of the establishment of the above-mentioned makeshift Covid hospital,” the WBPCC president said in a letter to Modi.
In a separate letter to Banerjee, Choudhury said, “In view of the imminent danger of the third wave and omicron lurking around, I would request you to kindly coordinate with the central government and expedite the process of establishment of two makeshift Covid hospitals at Murshidabad and Kalyani.”
As many as 422 omicron cases have been detected across 17 states and union territories in India so far, and 130 patients have recovered or migrated.
